April 15, 2025
Dear Friends and Family,
The next seven segments will focus on the history and character of several law enforcement, intelligence and military agencies. This particular segment looks at the early formation of the FBI and intelligence agencies beginning in the late 1910s through World War II. The segment has several recurring themes that are noteworthy:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The next seven segments will focus on the history and character of several law enforcement, intelligence and military agencies. This particular segment looks at the early formation of the FBI and intelligence agencies beginning in the late 1910s through World War II. The segment has several recurring themes that are noteworthy:
- The emergence of espionage by foreign adversaries that have persisted and intensified over the last 100+ years and how that has forced a response on the part of the U.S. government.
- The length of time that the Frankfurt School and cultural Marxism including their “critical theories” have been prevalent and sustained in our country.
- The haphazard way our intelligence agencies were formed and how quickly they have rotted (more on this subject will be in Segment 7).
- The length of time the Soviets and Socialist advocates have engaged in their efforts to infiltrate and pollute our institutions, including academia and our government. Based on the excerpts of the last series, they have had substantial success.
Happy Learning,
Harley
THE THE GOVERNMENT OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH – SEGMENT 5
LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE: 1920 – 1947 -- EXCERPTS
Introduction: This is a counterintelligence story –a chronicle of a battle the FBI and CIA fought for decades before they succumbed to a generations-old hostile foreign intelligence operation to destroy the United States and Western civilization from within.
World War I and its Aftermath: In early 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act to empower the Justice Department to arrest, detain, and deport enemy spies and agents. President Wilson’s executive orders gave the department virtual free reign. The Alien Enemy Bureau nested in the Justice Department’s War Emergency Division. That small unit compiled lists, monitored, and arranged for the roundups of suspected foreigners from enemy nations. No due process needed.
At age 24, shortly after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, J. Edgar Hoover earned a promotion to head the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division, popularly known as the Radical Division. Its job was to hunt down extremists and others – mainly anarchists, radical socialists, and Communists, both American -born and foreign-born – who sought to subvert American constitutional government.
An anarchist terrorist bombed the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in June 1919. That day, coordinate attacks struck political figures, judges, and police officers in eight cities across the country. The public demanded action. Hoover oversaw the deportation of 249 Russian-born anarchists and Communists back to their homes. In early 1920 the Palmer Raids began to sweep up thousands of suspected subversives, deporting hundreds. Hoover started to become a national figure as the vanguard against extremist subversion of the United States.
On the heels of the anarchist bombings and German sabotage, this new, existential threat to the American way of life captured the public imagination. Many – usually friends or allies of the targets – derided it as a Red Scare, an irrational fear, a phobia. The German saboteurs undermined the American war effort but had never presented an existential danger to tear apart the country itself. But the Bolsheviks and their allies would build networks of spies, agents, and collaborators in every sector of American society. They were doing it in the United States as they were in postwar Weimar Germany.
The Roaring Twenties: The constitutional amendment to ban alcoholic beverages fueled an underground economy of the 1920s among states and from smugglers abroad and spurred the dawn of interstate organized crime. Prohibition marked the rise of the gangsters. Bank robberies, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and more overwhelmed state and local police, and criminals escaped over state lines. During his short administration that began in 1921, President Harding used the Bureau of Investigation to hunt his mainstream political opponents. Even the FBI’s official history concedes, “In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations.” Harding died suddenly in 1923 and was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. That year, with the exposure of the Harding-era Teapot Dome oil scandal, word of the late president’s corruption and his political abuse of the bureau became known.
Facing not only the criminal gangster empires of Al Capone and the Mafia but also high-level corruption in the government he had inherited, Coolidge sacked his Harding-appointed attorney general and set out to clean up a filthy, corrupt Justice Department. He brought in a new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, who found the Bureau of Investigation “in exceeding bad odor,” a unit “filled with men with bad records” with “many convicted of crimes,” a “lawless” entity whose “agents engaged in many practices which are brutal and tyrannical in the extreme.” Stone recruited New York lawyer Bill Donovan to run the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. Within that division, Stone promoted 29-year-old Hoover to head the Bureau of Investigation.
Hoover purged the bureau of what he called “political hacks.” More federal laws to “fix” problems called for a larger federal apparatus to enforce those laws. This duty fell to the people fighting the Communist-anarchist endgame of overthrowing the government, the recently revived Ku Klux Klan, and other subversives. Stone kept Hoover as the bureau’s Director. Hoover found his boss, Donovan, as a shoddy lawyer and administrator, a social climber married to money. Donovan found Hoover a detail-oriented but dull and visionless bureaucrat who had no life and lived with his mother. Hostility between the two would last until Donovan’s death in 1959, with Hoover always expanding his Donovan file. (Note: Donovan would later be tapped to form the OSS which ultimately became the CIA)
Mass media and entertainment generated intense public interest in the fight against gangsters. The exploits of the G-men under J. Edgar Hoover enraptured the American public. The Communists were steadily infiltrating Hollywood, but Hoover nonetheless made his own friends in Tinseltown to dramatize the bureau’s reputation as America’s invincible lawmen and build the brand that today’s FBI still enjoys.
The fun of cultural Marxism in Weimar Germany came to an end once Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. The critical theorists from the Frankfurt School, disproportionately atheist Jews, would migrate to safer and more welcoming environments in Switzerland, France, and the U.K. Those free countries would shelter them as refugees. So would the United States, which would import most of the Frankfurt School and allow it to take root.
Cultural Marxism: Karl Marx’s goal was not to improve but to destroy family, human relationships, economics, patriotism, loyalty, morals, religion, Western civilization. That irreconcilable culture warfare approach would become known as “cultural Marxism.” A “critical” theory is an intellectual set of guidelines to produce thought processes that program people to see the world as being between oppressors and the oppressed, and that the oppressed must rise up and defeat the oppressors.
Like none before and few since, Hoover sensed and understood the nature of subversion. Marxist operatives would use every subterfuge to undermine American laws, polarize the country, run influence operations and espionage, and destroy the American way of life. For the most part, it was a foreign enemy. Tracking, disrupting, and uprooting it was an obligatory function of the federal government. America’s defense in 1920 depended entirely on twenty-five-year-old J. Edgar Hoover.
FDR Empowers a New FBI: During his first presidential campaign in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has promised all Americans a “New Deal” to pull the country out of the Depression. His strategy called for the massive expansion and centralization of the federal government. He consolidated various federal detective offices into the bureau and elevated the force to the semi-autonomous Federal Bureau of Investigation. FDR appointed Hoover to lead the FBI. The New Deal called for newer and bigger bureaucracies and more federal laws to grant them power and authority. More federal laws meant more need for central investigation and enforcement, which led to a growing FBI.
The Comintern (an international organization that advocated world communism) had penetrated and even taken over key American labor unions and teachers’ organizations. FDR’s New Deal provided Stalin’s secret services ample opportunity to find jobs in America’s expanding central government. Roosevelt tasked the FBI with investigating American Nazis in 1934 for links to foreign agents. Two years later, he and his secretary of state assigned the FBI to collect “intelligence” on “fascist and communist groups” as threats to national security.
After the Frankfurt School tried brief experiments in Paris and London, its permanent home became New York City. The Frankfurt Schoolers found an enthusiastic host, a philosopher named John Dewey, a revered fixture at the Columbia University Teachers College. That college taught a substantial percentage of teachers who would go on to populate schools across the United States. At that time, Dewey was experimenting with educational methods on American children as head of the National Education Association (NEA) teachers’ union. He believed that teaching children to become individual achievers was a capitalist plot to keep the ruling bourgeoisie in power. His methods would gradually detach children from their families and shape them for what he called a collective “social purpose.” He would do this he said, by “controlling methods of teaching and discipline and materials of study” to create “education of a new social order.” That new order would be socialism. The National Education Association would never stray far from the intellectual base of the Frankfurt School.
As the threat of war loomed under the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, Hoover gave speeches around the country to warn the public about how Soviet-sponsored subversion worked. Through their proxies, the Soviets exploited every vulnerable and tension in the United States to drive deeper rifts and pit Americans against one another. Hoover understood what cultural Marxism, propelled with its logic chain of critical theory, would do to attack American society by working legally within the system. “Herein lies the greatest threat of the foreign isms,” he said. “Wily, cunning masters or perversion that they are, with no regard for truth, they poison and pollute the very atmosphere of freedom with venomous attacks upon everything which we hold dear – our flag, our country, our churches, our homes, our institutions and our traditions. It is the object of these schemers to raise doubt in the minds of our misinformed citizens, who too frequently follow the leader for the mere purpose of gaining some recognition.
Donovan and Hoover: Rivals for Foreign Intelligence: World War II was a three-way war for the planet and mankind. A two-way war joined the United States and free Europe and their worldwide empires, free China, and other countries as allies with Stalin’s Soviet Union to defeat the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The Allies versus the Axis. Very simple. And very simplistic. The third way, a world-war-within-a-world-war, pitted the Soviet Union and its Comintern agents against the rest of the Allies while they were allies against the Axis.
The United States fought foreign subversion at home with the FBI; it had no standing foreign intelligence service. As the threat of war grew before Pearl Harbor, Washington had few means of collecting and synthesizing intelligence of its own. Its ability to insert secret agents into hostile territory, or even into contested areas to resist an enemy advance, was zero. Uncle Sam had almost no experienced civilian intelligence professionals, no reserves, no retirees, no experienced veterans. It had no place to train new recruits, and no office to recruit them in the first place. President Roosevelt needed a foreign intelligence service, and he needed it fast.
Hoover came up with a plan. The FBI would become America’s worldwide intelligence organization. His plan was bold and well-conceived. Roosevelt seemed to like the idea. But as a political leader, the president preferred teams of rivals – he fancied himself a “juggler” of people and politics – and he wanted an alternative.
FDR asked Donovan to devise plans for a new intelligence service. Weeks after Hitler turned against Stalin, FDR created a Coordinator of Information (COI). It was the summer of 1941. The president asked Donovan to run it. The COI started as a seat-of-the-pants, pop-up enterprise. Donovan reached into his personal networks to build a team of skillful, learned scholars and operators. Donovan began to see the need for a real espionage service with human agents, clandestine communications, and all that went with it. He split the COI into two parts: one for overt communication abroad and the other for foreign propaganda, collection and analysis of foreign intelligence, and for running intelligence operations abroad. The energetic New York Irishman, constantly enthusing with new ideas, thought big. He would head the second entity with an appropriate name, the Office of Strategic Services. OSS would be funded quietly out of a secret presidential budget.
Donovan built an irregular service of amateurs from conscripted soldiers and sailors, enlisted men and officers; bankers and international lawyers; journalists and broadcasters; and faculty from what were then the nation’s most prestigious universities. Donovan’s improvised OSS depended on crucial training, planning, and other support from the British, who had centuries of cloak-and-dagger experience behind them and a deliciously subversive leader, Prime Minister Churchill. Churchill took what could be called a Keep Great Britain Great approach to statesmanship. The prime minister didn’t help build the OSS to help the Americans. He did it so save the British Empire. A foreign intelligence service that would breed and deliver America’s first worldwide intelligence service. Hoover saw danger.
A Poisoned Start for the OSS: The military and OSS needed people with direct knowledge of everything about enemy territory. They turned to immigrant scholars who had lived under Hitler’s rule and in Nazi-occupied areas. There were two general types: immigrants who were genuinely pro-American, anti-fascist, and anti-Communist; and immigrants principally loyal to the Kremlin who wanted American troops to liberate Europe and China on Stalin’s terms and ultimately to overthrow the United States Constitution. Britain gave the OSS a running start. Donovan seemed blind to the fact that Communists and foreign assets recruited into the OSS would not have American interests first in mind. Donovan was no Communist sympathizer, no softie, and no fool. Before the war, he viewed Stalin as no better than Hitler. But talent was talent, and OSS needed it in spades.
Frankfurt School faculty and graduates’ inherent knowledge and abilities naturally gravitated toward the OSS’s Research & Analysis division, the unit that intercepted for President Roosevelt and other decision-makers. Three of those Frankfurt School men, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, became top members of the division’s Central European Section. For the Frankfurt School group, as with the controlled Soviet agents in the OSS, the immediate job was to revive their 1920s work to shape postwar Germany in their image. To accomplish that strategic objective, they would steer the OSS to ignore undermine and discredit the anti-Communist German resistance to Hitler.
Wild Bill Donovan’s greatest contributions to the war effort were of the paramilitary type, supplying commandos and other unconventional forces to fight the Nazis and their allies behind the lines. Donovan wanted movers and innovators. His blind spot for Stalinists was his weakness, and he had a personal animus against the prime man who called them out. His greatest strength rested in his endless energy and his search for those committed to the mission. Several of Donovan’s world-class picks of amateurs would become some of the most legendary heroes in American intelligence. They included Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, James Angleton, William Colby, and William J. Casey.
Rot Among the Bounty: For all its extraordinary innovation and heroism, the OSS was rotten through and through. The organization would succeed as long as its mission suited Soviet interests. For it to survive after the defeat of mutual enemies, American intelligence would have to be abolished and reconstituted.
American Intelligence after the War: President Roosevelt had understood the OSS, strongly supported its mission, and trusted Donovan. He backed the idea of a peacetime intelligence agency after the war. With the defeat of Germany in sight in September 1944, Roosevelt formally asked Donovan to keep working on how the service should serve the national interests.
When Roosevelt died in April 1945, but before the German went down in defeat weeks later, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, with approval from the Navy, State, and Justice Departments, threw ice on Donovan’s idea. They found a very receptive Truman.
Armed with his own plan for postwar intelligence, refined from the one FDR had rejected at the dawn of World War II, Hoover went on the offensive for the FBI to take the lead. He had little trouble persuading the new president that a Cold War defense against the Soviets would never survive with an intelligence community full of Communists and Soviet agents. He took the fight to the public and to Congress. Different interests leaked information to the media designed to sway public opinion and influence legislation in Congress about peacetime foreign intelligence.
After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, top OSS staff urged Donovan to inform the public about what the service had done to help with the victory. The public had no idea. The OSS leader sat down with journalists and generated positive press. The article boosted OSS morale. But they didn’t move Truman or his budget chief. President Truman broke up the OSS by fiat in September 1945. Nobody even consulted Donovan.
Widespread Soviet penetration of the OSS ranked high in public attention by the end of the war. Soviet intelligence had already penetrated American academia, journalism, entertainment and culture, politics, and the federal government itself. The Cold War with the Soviets demanded full investigations. The clandestine nature of Communist Party activity confused and frightened the public. And it confused non-Communist friends and colleagues of those living secret double lives. Not all these agents were spies, that is, controlled operatives whose job it was to steal secrets and pass them on to Moscow. Many had more influential work. Their task was not to spy in the popular sense of the word, but to manipulate the perceptions, policies, and actions of others to benefit the Kremlin.
The United States reorganized its defense and national security strategy and structure after World War II. President Truman dissolved the OSS. Now, with FDR having given Stalin most of what he had wanted, it took the United States a couple of years to decide its new postwar victor’s role and face the fact that the Soviet Union would remain an unrelenting foe.
Source: Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains by J. Michael Waller (2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
LAW ENFORCEMENT AND INTELLIGENCE: 1920 – 1947 -- EXCERPTS
Introduction: This is a counterintelligence story –a chronicle of a battle the FBI and CIA fought for decades before they succumbed to a generations-old hostile foreign intelligence operation to destroy the United States and Western civilization from within.
World War I and its Aftermath: In early 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act to empower the Justice Department to arrest, detain, and deport enemy spies and agents. President Wilson’s executive orders gave the department virtual free reign. The Alien Enemy Bureau nested in the Justice Department’s War Emergency Division. That small unit compiled lists, monitored, and arranged for the roundups of suspected foreigners from enemy nations. No due process needed.
At age 24, shortly after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, J. Edgar Hoover earned a promotion to head the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division, popularly known as the Radical Division. Its job was to hunt down extremists and others – mainly anarchists, radical socialists, and Communists, both American -born and foreign-born – who sought to subvert American constitutional government.
An anarchist terrorist bombed the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in June 1919. That day, coordinate attacks struck political figures, judges, and police officers in eight cities across the country. The public demanded action. Hoover oversaw the deportation of 249 Russian-born anarchists and Communists back to their homes. In early 1920 the Palmer Raids began to sweep up thousands of suspected subversives, deporting hundreds. Hoover started to become a national figure as the vanguard against extremist subversion of the United States.
On the heels of the anarchist bombings and German sabotage, this new, existential threat to the American way of life captured the public imagination. Many – usually friends or allies of the targets – derided it as a Red Scare, an irrational fear, a phobia. The German saboteurs undermined the American war effort but had never presented an existential danger to tear apart the country itself. But the Bolsheviks and their allies would build networks of spies, agents, and collaborators in every sector of American society. They were doing it in the United States as they were in postwar Weimar Germany.
The Roaring Twenties: The constitutional amendment to ban alcoholic beverages fueled an underground economy of the 1920s among states and from smugglers abroad and spurred the dawn of interstate organized crime. Prohibition marked the rise of the gangsters. Bank robberies, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and more overwhelmed state and local police, and criminals escaped over state lines. During his short administration that began in 1921, President Harding used the Bureau of Investigation to hunt his mainstream political opponents. Even the FBI’s official history concedes, “In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations.” Harding died suddenly in 1923 and was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. That year, with the exposure of the Harding-era Teapot Dome oil scandal, word of the late president’s corruption and his political abuse of the bureau became known.
Facing not only the criminal gangster empires of Al Capone and the Mafia but also high-level corruption in the government he had inherited, Coolidge sacked his Harding-appointed attorney general and set out to clean up a filthy, corrupt Justice Department. He brought in a new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, who found the Bureau of Investigation “in exceeding bad odor,” a unit “filled with men with bad records” with “many convicted of crimes,” a “lawless” entity whose “agents engaged in many practices which are brutal and tyrannical in the extreme.” Stone recruited New York lawyer Bill Donovan to run the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. Within that division, Stone promoted 29-year-old Hoover to head the Bureau of Investigation.
Hoover purged the bureau of what he called “political hacks.” More federal laws to “fix” problems called for a larger federal apparatus to enforce those laws. This duty fell to the people fighting the Communist-anarchist endgame of overthrowing the government, the recently revived Ku Klux Klan, and other subversives. Stone kept Hoover as the bureau’s Director. Hoover found his boss, Donovan, as a shoddy lawyer and administrator, a social climber married to money. Donovan found Hoover a detail-oriented but dull and visionless bureaucrat who had no life and lived with his mother. Hostility between the two would last until Donovan’s death in 1959, with Hoover always expanding his Donovan file. (Note: Donovan would later be tapped to form the OSS which ultimately became the CIA)
Mass media and entertainment generated intense public interest in the fight against gangsters. The exploits of the G-men under J. Edgar Hoover enraptured the American public. The Communists were steadily infiltrating Hollywood, but Hoover nonetheless made his own friends in Tinseltown to dramatize the bureau’s reputation as America’s invincible lawmen and build the brand that today’s FBI still enjoys.
The fun of cultural Marxism in Weimar Germany came to an end once Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. The critical theorists from the Frankfurt School, disproportionately atheist Jews, would migrate to safer and more welcoming environments in Switzerland, France, and the U.K. Those free countries would shelter them as refugees. So would the United States, which would import most of the Frankfurt School and allow it to take root.
Cultural Marxism: Karl Marx’s goal was not to improve but to destroy family, human relationships, economics, patriotism, loyalty, morals, religion, Western civilization. That irreconcilable culture warfare approach would become known as “cultural Marxism.” A “critical” theory is an intellectual set of guidelines to produce thought processes that program people to see the world as being between oppressors and the oppressed, and that the oppressed must rise up and defeat the oppressors.
Like none before and few since, Hoover sensed and understood the nature of subversion. Marxist operatives would use every subterfuge to undermine American laws, polarize the country, run influence operations and espionage, and destroy the American way of life. For the most part, it was a foreign enemy. Tracking, disrupting, and uprooting it was an obligatory function of the federal government. America’s defense in 1920 depended entirely on twenty-five-year-old J. Edgar Hoover.
FDR Empowers a New FBI: During his first presidential campaign in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has promised all Americans a “New Deal” to pull the country out of the Depression. His strategy called for the massive expansion and centralization of the federal government. He consolidated various federal detective offices into the bureau and elevated the force to the semi-autonomous Federal Bureau of Investigation. FDR appointed Hoover to lead the FBI. The New Deal called for newer and bigger bureaucracies and more federal laws to grant them power and authority. More federal laws meant more need for central investigation and enforcement, which led to a growing FBI.
The Comintern (an international organization that advocated world communism) had penetrated and even taken over key American labor unions and teachers’ organizations. FDR’s New Deal provided Stalin’s secret services ample opportunity to find jobs in America’s expanding central government. Roosevelt tasked the FBI with investigating American Nazis in 1934 for links to foreign agents. Two years later, he and his secretary of state assigned the FBI to collect “intelligence” on “fascist and communist groups” as threats to national security.
After the Frankfurt School tried brief experiments in Paris and London, its permanent home became New York City. The Frankfurt Schoolers found an enthusiastic host, a philosopher named John Dewey, a revered fixture at the Columbia University Teachers College. That college taught a substantial percentage of teachers who would go on to populate schools across the United States. At that time, Dewey was experimenting with educational methods on American children as head of the National Education Association (NEA) teachers’ union. He believed that teaching children to become individual achievers was a capitalist plot to keep the ruling bourgeoisie in power. His methods would gradually detach children from their families and shape them for what he called a collective “social purpose.” He would do this he said, by “controlling methods of teaching and discipline and materials of study” to create “education of a new social order.” That new order would be socialism. The National Education Association would never stray far from the intellectual base of the Frankfurt School.
As the threat of war loomed under the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, Hoover gave speeches around the country to warn the public about how Soviet-sponsored subversion worked. Through their proxies, the Soviets exploited every vulnerable and tension in the United States to drive deeper rifts and pit Americans against one another. Hoover understood what cultural Marxism, propelled with its logic chain of critical theory, would do to attack American society by working legally within the system. “Herein lies the greatest threat of the foreign isms,” he said. “Wily, cunning masters or perversion that they are, with no regard for truth, they poison and pollute the very atmosphere of freedom with venomous attacks upon everything which we hold dear – our flag, our country, our churches, our homes, our institutions and our traditions. It is the object of these schemers to raise doubt in the minds of our misinformed citizens, who too frequently follow the leader for the mere purpose of gaining some recognition.
Donovan and Hoover: Rivals for Foreign Intelligence: World War II was a three-way war for the planet and mankind. A two-way war joined the United States and free Europe and their worldwide empires, free China, and other countries as allies with Stalin’s Soviet Union to defeat the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The Allies versus the Axis. Very simple. And very simplistic. The third way, a world-war-within-a-world-war, pitted the Soviet Union and its Comintern agents against the rest of the Allies while they were allies against the Axis.
The United States fought foreign subversion at home with the FBI; it had no standing foreign intelligence service. As the threat of war grew before Pearl Harbor, Washington had few means of collecting and synthesizing intelligence of its own. Its ability to insert secret agents into hostile territory, or even into contested areas to resist an enemy advance, was zero. Uncle Sam had almost no experienced civilian intelligence professionals, no reserves, no retirees, no experienced veterans. It had no place to train new recruits, and no office to recruit them in the first place. President Roosevelt needed a foreign intelligence service, and he needed it fast.
Hoover came up with a plan. The FBI would become America’s worldwide intelligence organization. His plan was bold and well-conceived. Roosevelt seemed to like the idea. But as a political leader, the president preferred teams of rivals – he fancied himself a “juggler” of people and politics – and he wanted an alternative.
FDR asked Donovan to devise plans for a new intelligence service. Weeks after Hitler turned against Stalin, FDR created a Coordinator of Information (COI). It was the summer of 1941. The president asked Donovan to run it. The COI started as a seat-of-the-pants, pop-up enterprise. Donovan reached into his personal networks to build a team of skillful, learned scholars and operators. Donovan began to see the need for a real espionage service with human agents, clandestine communications, and all that went with it. He split the COI into two parts: one for overt communication abroad and the other for foreign propaganda, collection and analysis of foreign intelligence, and for running intelligence operations abroad. The energetic New York Irishman, constantly enthusing with new ideas, thought big. He would head the second entity with an appropriate name, the Office of Strategic Services. OSS would be funded quietly out of a secret presidential budget.
Donovan built an irregular service of amateurs from conscripted soldiers and sailors, enlisted men and officers; bankers and international lawyers; journalists and broadcasters; and faculty from what were then the nation’s most prestigious universities. Donovan’s improvised OSS depended on crucial training, planning, and other support from the British, who had centuries of cloak-and-dagger experience behind them and a deliciously subversive leader, Prime Minister Churchill. Churchill took what could be called a Keep Great Britain Great approach to statesmanship. The prime minister didn’t help build the OSS to help the Americans. He did it so save the British Empire. A foreign intelligence service that would breed and deliver America’s first worldwide intelligence service. Hoover saw danger.
A Poisoned Start for the OSS: The military and OSS needed people with direct knowledge of everything about enemy territory. They turned to immigrant scholars who had lived under Hitler’s rule and in Nazi-occupied areas. There were two general types: immigrants who were genuinely pro-American, anti-fascist, and anti-Communist; and immigrants principally loyal to the Kremlin who wanted American troops to liberate Europe and China on Stalin’s terms and ultimately to overthrow the United States Constitution. Britain gave the OSS a running start. Donovan seemed blind to the fact that Communists and foreign assets recruited into the OSS would not have American interests first in mind. Donovan was no Communist sympathizer, no softie, and no fool. Before the war, he viewed Stalin as no better than Hitler. But talent was talent, and OSS needed it in spades.
Frankfurt School faculty and graduates’ inherent knowledge and abilities naturally gravitated toward the OSS’s Research & Analysis division, the unit that intercepted for President Roosevelt and other decision-makers. Three of those Frankfurt School men, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, became top members of the division’s Central European Section. For the Frankfurt School group, as with the controlled Soviet agents in the OSS, the immediate job was to revive their 1920s work to shape postwar Germany in their image. To accomplish that strategic objective, they would steer the OSS to ignore undermine and discredit the anti-Communist German resistance to Hitler.
Wild Bill Donovan’s greatest contributions to the war effort were of the paramilitary type, supplying commandos and other unconventional forces to fight the Nazis and their allies behind the lines. Donovan wanted movers and innovators. His blind spot for Stalinists was his weakness, and he had a personal animus against the prime man who called them out. His greatest strength rested in his endless energy and his search for those committed to the mission. Several of Donovan’s world-class picks of amateurs would become some of the most legendary heroes in American intelligence. They included Richard Helms, Allen Dulles, James Angleton, William Colby, and William J. Casey.
Rot Among the Bounty: For all its extraordinary innovation and heroism, the OSS was rotten through and through. The organization would succeed as long as its mission suited Soviet interests. For it to survive after the defeat of mutual enemies, American intelligence would have to be abolished and reconstituted.
American Intelligence after the War: President Roosevelt had understood the OSS, strongly supported its mission, and trusted Donovan. He backed the idea of a peacetime intelligence agency after the war. With the defeat of Germany in sight in September 1944, Roosevelt formally asked Donovan to keep working on how the service should serve the national interests.
When Roosevelt died in April 1945, but before the German went down in defeat weeks later, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, with approval from the Navy, State, and Justice Departments, threw ice on Donovan’s idea. They found a very receptive Truman.
Armed with his own plan for postwar intelligence, refined from the one FDR had rejected at the dawn of World War II, Hoover went on the offensive for the FBI to take the lead. He had little trouble persuading the new president that a Cold War defense against the Soviets would never survive with an intelligence community full of Communists and Soviet agents. He took the fight to the public and to Congress. Different interests leaked information to the media designed to sway public opinion and influence legislation in Congress about peacetime foreign intelligence.
After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, top OSS staff urged Donovan to inform the public about what the service had done to help with the victory. The public had no idea. The OSS leader sat down with journalists and generated positive press. The article boosted OSS morale. But they didn’t move Truman or his budget chief. President Truman broke up the OSS by fiat in September 1945. Nobody even consulted Donovan.
Widespread Soviet penetration of the OSS ranked high in public attention by the end of the war. Soviet intelligence had already penetrated American academia, journalism, entertainment and culture, politics, and the federal government itself. The Cold War with the Soviets demanded full investigations. The clandestine nature of Communist Party activity confused and frightened the public. And it confused non-Communist friends and colleagues of those living secret double lives. Not all these agents were spies, that is, controlled operatives whose job it was to steal secrets and pass them on to Moscow. Many had more influential work. Their task was not to spy in the popular sense of the word, but to manipulate the perceptions, policies, and actions of others to benefit the Kremlin.
The United States reorganized its defense and national security strategy and structure after World War II. President Truman dissolved the OSS. Now, with FDR having given Stalin most of what he had wanted, it took the United States a couple of years to decide its new postwar victor’s role and face the fact that the Soviet Union would remain an unrelenting foe.
Source: Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains by J. Michael Waller (2024)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| exec_5l_u.s._intel_1920_-_1947_--_segment_5.pdf |